With more than 800 souls on board, including a nephew of an emperor, the U.S. ship-of-the-line Delaware, one of the most powerful ships afloat, set sail from Hampton Roads for her maiden voyage at 0700 on 20 February 1828, bound for the Mediterranean. Almost immediately after getting under way, the huge ship began steering erratically and within an hour, after failing to answer her helm, she stuck fast on Willoughby Spit. Shifting guns and people “for the purpose of extricating her . . . all [had] no effect,” an anonymous diarist of the crew noted. But a flood tide at 0900 prompted renewed hope of the ship freeing herself. Some of her tars climbed aloft to clew up her sails, while others weighed the bower anchor and let go the stream anchor, which they used to haul her off. When inspection revealed no injury to the ship, the Delaware set course for Gibraltar without further mishap.
“The steering of the ship which excited so much alarm when the ship got underway,” Sailing Master John Robinson later penned in the log, “was much better after she got to sea than was anticipated.” Edward R. “Ned” Myers, serving on the forecastle at that time, later would remember the Delaware as a man-of-war that “required some little time to get her trim and sailing. She turned out, however, to be a good vessel; sailing fairly, steering well, and proving an excellent sea boat.” She also was, Myers remembered with some fondness, “the happiest ship I ever served in.”
Authorized by an Act of Congress on 29 April 1816 and designed by Naval Constructor William Doughty, the Delaware was laid down at the Gosport (Norfolk, Virginia) Navy Yard in August 1817. Constructed of live oak, white oak, and pine, one of the Navy’s largest ships took form under resident Naval Constructor Francis Grice. At about 1030 on 21 October 1820, “this model of Naval architecture was named and glided down into her destined element,” the American Beacon reported, emerging from the ship house “in a style of elegance which charmed every beholder” to a salute fired by the flag-bedecked frigate Guerriere. Later, “a party of ladies and gentlemen partook of a very handsome dinner” where some of the latter tendered toasts. The most popular was that volunteered by Constant Freeman, who had served in the Continental Army as an artillery officer and who had been made brevet colonel in the War of 1812. “Virginia Ships and Virginia Women,” Freeman offered, “may they be well manned.” Twelve cheers followed, and then Commodore James Barron raised his glass to the “Navy of the United States.”
After the almost giddy “manifestation of public feeling” that had accompanied her launching, the Navy had no immediate need for the Delaware. Workmen housed her over, and she lay idle for more than six years before the commandant of the Gosport yard received orders to have her repaired and completed. Pierced for 100 guns, she received a battery of 92 for her first cruise.
The honor of being the Delaware’s first commanding officer went to 42-year-old Captain John Downes, and few men could have possessed better qualifications in the Navy of that day. One of five children, he had first gone to sea as a waiter to his father, a purser’s steward in the frigate Constitution. An acting midshipman at age 15 in 1800, Downes went on to distinguish himself under Lieutenant David Porter in the First Barbary War (1803), then again in the frigate Essex under then-Captain Porter during the War of 1812. In 1815 he commanded the sloop-of-war Epervier when she helped vanquish the Algerine frigate Meshouda. Downes placed the Delaware in commission on 5 December 1827.
On her maiden voyage the Delaware carried as a passenger the eminent 24-year old French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte—nephew of the French emperor—his wife, Zénaïde, and their son Joseph Lucien Charles Napoleon and daughter Alexandrine Gertrude Zénaïde. Second prince of Canino and Musignano, Bonaparte was returning to Italy, where he had been raised. As Ned Myers later reminisced, “[Bonaparte] . . . got a passage in our ship, on account of the difficulty of traveling in Europe for one of his name and family. He was the first, and only Prince I ever had for a shipmate.”
Captain William M. Crane, commander of the Mediterranean Squadron, broke his broad pennant in the Delaware soon after she reached Gibraltar, and Captain Downes went to the frigate Java. Crane used the Delaware as his flagship for the remainder of the cruise, which ended with her return to Norfolk on 2 January 1830, and ultimately hauled his pennant down on 10 February. Placed in ordinary on 17 June 1833, she enjoyed the distinction of being the first ship dry-docked at Gosport.
The Delaware made another goodwill cruise to the Mediterranean as flagship of Commodore Daniel T. Patterson (1834–36), then lay in ordinary at Norfolk before serving a brief stationary tour as station ship, Norfolk. She voyaged to the coast of Brazil in 1841, flying the pennant of Commodore Charles Morris, with Captain Charles S. McCauley in command, and deployed to the Mediterranean one more time before returning home in 1844. Periods of being in ordinary at Norfolk would be her lot (punctuated by an inactive period at Boston in 1847) for the remainder of her days, which were numbered as the shadow of civil war began to darken the Tidewater region.
Ironically, at that juncture in the Delaware’s history, the man in whose hands her fate rested was none other than the officer who had commanded her on her last active deployment two decades previously. McCauley, now commander at Gosport, was unwilling to take any action that might fan the embers of secession into an open blaze. He presided over a dramatically worsening situation until he ultimately ordered the scuttling of almost all the ships still at the Gosport yard at 1600 on 21 April 1861. By the time Flag Officer Hiram Paulding arrived in the steam sloop Pawnee—under orders to save what ships he could—virtually nothing remained.
The Delaware had been scuttled some distance from the other ships. Her sister ship, the New York, laid down the same year the Delaware had been launched—and now occupying one of the yard’s two large ship houses—was destroyed when Paulding’s men set fire to the building.
Captain George T. Sinclair, in his initial report to Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen T. Mallory on the destruction of the Gosport yard, reported that the Delaware could be raised. The ship, however, was found to be in such bad condition that the Confederacy opted not to even try to return her to active service. In so doing, they undoubtedly echoed the sentiments of John Lenthall, chief of the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repair, who, on 10 October 1854, had considered the Delaware “unfit for sea service, and [requiring] extensive repairs or rebuilding.” Ships very seldom come full circle, but the Delaware died where she had been born. Her fate reflects the changing nature of naval warfare—in which more powerful guns rendered wooden ships such as the Delaware obsolete—and the fledgling Confederate States Navy’s belief that it needed to make ready to fight that new kind of war at sea.